From the absolutely appalling cover art that has defaced her books since she was first published, you would think Georgette Heyer the most gooey, ghastly, cutesy, sentimental and trashy author who ever dared put pen to paper. The surprise in store for you, if you have not encountered her before, is that once you tear off, burn or ignore those disgusting covers you will discover her to be one of the wittiest, most insightful and rewarding prose writers imaginable. Her stories satisfy all the requirements of romantic fiction, but the language she uses, the dialogue, the ironic awareness, the satire and insight – these rise far above the genre.
In the matter of period dramas it is a truth universally acknowledged that a period film or TV show tells you more about the period in which it is made than the period in which it is set. Watch, to take a more or less random example, Robert Redford in Jack Clayton’s 1974 The Great Gatsby and all you will be able to see is early 1970s style, cinematography and manner. Watch Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 version of the same story and it is the styles of the earlyish 21st century that you see laid out before you. In many period dramas today there is the added element of deliberate Blackaddery anachronisms and plain historical nonsenses that we find in comedies and romps like Bridgerton, The Favourite, The Great, etc. None of this is to criticise that style – it is a category in which we could place Shakespeare’s great history and Roman plays, after all. The aim of such a form of fiction or adaptation is to shine a light on this present more than on that past.
But there is another style of literary historical fiction whose project it is to research and reproduce the airs, modes and everyday details of a period with so much authenticity that you might almost be reading an author of that age. Georgette Heyer stands as first among equals in this approach. Give or take a few changes of typography and spelling, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that an early nineteenth-century reader could pick up her book Venetia and consume it as if it were a creation of their time. That is an exaggeration perhaps, but such is the game that Heyer plays with the reader: the recreation of an age faultless enough in setting and in prose to immerse us in the era so completely that we abandon our 20th-century attitudes and ethics (Heyer wrote from the mid-1930s to the 1970s) and slip into the sensibilities of another age. We, the reader, do not bring our thinking to her stories; she brings Regency thinking to us. We can mock, disparage and howl with outrage as much as we like at what we see as unchecked racism, sexism, snobbery and suppression, but this is how the world was, truly was, and if we enter it we had better leave our 21st-century sensibilities behind. For, beneath the rules, taboos and demands of that alien society, human hearts beat, pulses quicken and chests heave with all the passion that they do today. Indeed, the tighter the bodice and the stricter the conventions, the more intensely those passions seem to burn.
But all the same, why bother, you might ask? If Bridgerton and other less strait-laced and tightly bodiced dramas and novels can give us the style of the Regency without its abominable injustices and stifling hierarchies, and with lots of extra romping and fizz, why do we need a writer like Georgette Heyer, whose diligent, almost academically precise researches and immaculate ear for language, custom and historical detail result in texts that are so much denser and more demanding of concentration and memory than the lighter, less substantial fare now on offer elsewhere? It is not, after all, as if Heyer is Hilary Mantel, or Jane Austen herself. Heyer did not write, or pretend to write, Literature with a capital L: she wrote entertainments. These days we expect our entertainments to be zippy, rollicking and liberating, not reproductive of the orotundity and prolixity of the language of two hundred years ago. So again, I ask, why bother?
Let me answer with what Heyer and the Regency would call a touch of roundaboutation. I’ll begin by defining terms.
The age we call the English Regency lasted from 1811 to 1820, a very short span, and yet those nine years seem to have been used as a backdrop to more historical fiction and romance than any comparable period in British history. For every novel set in the much longer Tudor age (which lasted 118 years) there seem to be at least ten set in the Regency years.
By 1811, Nelson’s victory in Trafalgar six years earlier had seemed to secure the safety of the British Isles, but Napoleon was still running amok in Europe, his fire smoking but by no means extinguished. At home, King George III’s mental health was now considered compromised enough to force Parliament to do more than hide him away in Windsor Castle, where he could sign official documents without reading or seeming to understand them. An Act of Parliament established the Regency, appointing the king’s eldest son, also named George, a Regent, or de facto monarch. Now he could sign official documents without reading or seeming to understand them. This was a turbulent time in British history (when isn’t?). The ages of Reason and Enlightenment had culminated in two gigantic political upheavals, the American and French revolutions. Aside from the ever-present threat of Bonaparte, increased control in India and other colonial conquests had expanded British overseas influence to an unimagined degree, a popular development but one which required the raising of less popular new taxes to pay for the garrisoning and administration of those territories. Domestically, the new Industrial Revolution was transforming commerce, labour and living conditions.
People living in the period (unless they were churchmen, philosophers or the like) did not consider much the abstract, intellectual meaning of their age, nor the profound ethical, social and cultural import of its history, any more than we reflect on our own age. They concerned themselves, as people always do, with birth, education, love, marriage, money, property and death. Those who read and wrote books of any kind (such was the tenor of the times) were almost exclusively those who owned land, or came from land and believed without thinking in birthright, noble blood, titles, dignities and hierarchies. Education was available to few else, and the bloody examples of the French and American revolutions scarcely inclined the ruling class towards wide reform. These people were largely shaped by their birth – the circumstances, in other words, of their parents’ marriage. The ever rising middle class of professionals, tradesmen and mill-owners, the new dissenting religious sects, the impertinent political, social and artistic ideas sweeping over the world … All these brewed an anxiety in the ton, the beau monde or “Society” as it called itself, an anxiety that made them double down on the strict preservation of the old aristocratic bloodlines.
What this meant to a young girl “of quality” (in other words, from the leisured money, landed classes – not the daughter of a shopkeeper or industrialist, however rich) – and her parents was: “How will we find a husband?” The number of young men of eligible (i.e. noble and landed) families was limited. To keep it limited, the upper classes had developed what is now known as the marriage mart. A young girl of birth at the age of seventeen or eighteen would be presented to the king and queen at court. Once “out” in this way she would enjoy a season or two of balls in which to meet and catch a husband. The richest girls (those whose fathers offered the largest dowry) were snapped up first, followed by the prettiest. The rest were left on the shelf to live as old maids, companions, aunts and spinster hangers-on. For, it must be remembered, women’s money was not theirs to spend: it came from their fathers and would be spent and controlled by their husbands. So any woman who was unmarried was also, by definition, penurious or at least dependent.
We have to hold back our snorts of disapproval and sneers of derision. Yes, it goes against everything we believe in or are taught to respect and value. But this is how it was. Few from within questioned it. If they did not live like this, respecting titles, lineage, land and coats of arms – why, every nouveau riche iron master, mill-owner, shopkeeper and brewer would be able to build himself a large country house and go about the place as if equal to the bluest blood in the land. Unthinkable. Such is the power of money, of course, that plantation riches (slavery, in other words) and then banking, commercial and industrial wealth slowly did begin to open doors to new titles, and thus the aristocracy was able to hold its nose and replenish itself while still asserting the sacred, heaven-sponsored rights and dignities of Old Families.
All this as the tides of individualism, Romanticism, the common good and the rights of man were swelling on the horizon and threatening to sweep all away in a tsunami of reform, emancipation, suffrage, universal education and other distressing horrors.
Jane Austen, who lived inside this world, revolved her plots around exactly these questions of marriage settlements and the entailment and inheritance of property. In her best-loved novel, Pride and Prejudice, she manages to tell a story that treats those subjects and yet also creates the template for just about every romantic fiction that has ever followed. A bright, cheerful, intelligent, vivacious heroine meets an apparently rude, saturnine but charismatic man: they take a dislike to each other that we know masks an attraction that they cannot yet acknowledge. Misunderstandings and misreadings are overcome and hot-blooded sexual attraction combines with reason, good humour, practicality and sense to climax in … marriage.
Georgette Heyer’s Venetia, in character terms, conforms exactly to this template, which is no kind of criticism at all. After all, the great masterpieces hanging in galleries around the world nearly all conform to standard ideas of composition and subject matter: it is not complete originality that engages us, it is how the picture is executed. Treatment is all. And this is where Heyer stands at the very head of the field.
Prepare to engage with a whole new vocabulary. For example, to be drunk might cause you to be called foxed, disguised, tap-hackled, jug-bitten, bosky or half-sprung, or to be accused of having shot the cat. If you fool someone you might be bamming, gammoning, cutting a wheedle or making a May game of them, or perhaps doing it a trifle brown. If such fustian slum befogs you or brings you to point non plus, you will find that one of the miracles of Heyer’s writing is that context always makes everything crystal clear. Heyer herself used to get maddened when imitators who had not done the research would steal the slang phrases that she had tracked down in obscure letters, diaries and documents in libraries and archives, and put them into their works, but without care or a correct understanding. As a result she took to slyly making up one or two of her own fake Regency phrases as a way of trapping and catching these copy-cats out. She was not only expert in Regency language, but in every imaginable detail of female and male costume, , the specifics of estate management, food and drink, racing, , clubs, the protocols and particularities of routs, balls, assemblies, theatre parties, suppers, nuncheons and excursions. An attentive reader of Georgette Heyer will often be more familiar with the day-to-day details of Regency life than many an academic or cultural historian. It’s a daring thing to suggest, but I’ll venture it’s not far from the truth.
To satisfy the requirements of romantic fiction and to deliver wholly satisfactory adventure and romance, and to bring a complex and multifaceted era so sparklingly to life, to pay the reader the compliment of refusing to stint on the reality of the world she was escorting us to … this explains the enduring appeal of Georgette Heyer.
Some of Heyer’s fans are upset that there have been so few, if any, really successful adaptations of her works; they were saddened that the Bridgerton books of Julia Quinn were chosen, for example, over Heyer’s works for a big-budget Netflix serialisation.
My own view is that her apparent unsuitability for dramatisation might be for the very reason that, while she may not be, or set herself up to be, an author of Great Literature, Georgette Heyer is nonetheless a writer, a real writer, whose gifts and glories reveal themselves most perfectly in the act of reading. If a new fad for the Regency age causes her to win new readers, then that is enough.
This is an edited version of Stephen Fry’s introduction from The Folio Society’s edition of Georgette Heyer’s Venetia, illustrated by Sally Dunne with binding design by Jessica Hische, which is available exclusively from The Folio Society
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